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A friend of mine and I were talking about school. The friend has a student in middle school and apparently they are doing a team teaching environment. Teachers are grouped together and then students rotate as a small group between the teachers. It's also called a pod system. The idea is that it creates a school within a school environment so the school doesn't feel as huge to the students. There are three teams of teachers in this school.
Anyways, my friend tells me that her child has been placed in the "advanced" pod. She infers that the two other pods are "average" or perhaps one is "average" and one is for "behind" students.
I'm dubious about this claim. Can you really segregate kids in middle school based on academic ability? Even if you could, would an administration ever do this? It'd make a lot more sense to me to have a diverse classroom environment rather than trying to segregate everyone based on academic ability.
In reality, I think to one degree or another, we do this all the time, and have for decades.
Way back in the 1960s, my junior/senior high school had A,B,C,D, and E level classes.
In the mid-1970s in the junior high where I began teaching we had high, middle, and low classes.
In the county where I was principal we had regular classes, gifted base classes (student was in gifted English/history OR gifted math/science), gifted center classes (student was in gifted classes in all 4 core classes), mainstreamed sped students, and self-contained sped students.
What you're describing is called tracking and has fallen out of favor over the last couple or three decades.
Arguably, tracking groups of students with others having similar ability or achievement levels resulted in better outcomes.
What happened when tracks disappeared and you had only three, Honors, SPED and everybody else, the everybody else classes were all over the map in ability levels.
I had classes (high school) where the reading levels ranged from 2nd grade to above grade level, a spread of up to 10 years. Trying to find a happy medium where the low kids wouldn't be totally lost and the more on schedule kids wouldn't be bored out of their minds was.......challenging.
One of the reasons tracking fell out of favor was because some school systems had a tendency to place certain ethnic groups or kids from particular areas in the lower tracks automatically.
There was also the push for equity, which in education means mixing all ability levels together, in my opinion, has harmed some kids and set many others up for failure. Kids know when they can't keep up.
A friend of mine and I were talking about school. The friend has a student in middle school and apparently they are doing a team teaching environment. Teachers are grouped together and then students rotate as a small group between the teachers. It's also called a pod system. The idea is that it creates a school within a school environment so the school doesn't feel as huge to the students. There are three teams of teachers in this school.
Anyways, my friend tells me that her child has been placed in the "advanced" pod. She infers that the two other pods are "average" or perhaps one is "average" and one is for "behind" students.
I'm dubious about this claim. Can you really segregate kids in middle school based on academic ability? Even if you could, would an administration ever do this? It'd make a lot more sense to me to have a diverse classroom environment rather than trying to segregate everyone based on academic ability.
This sort of streaming was done for a long time. It might "make sense" for you - but from what viewpoint? Perhaps from the disadvantaged kid's viewpoint, perhaps even from the teacher's viewpoint. But perhaps not from the advanced kid's position - what benefit does she get?
It is less common now, and its not on the right side of the PC fence.
A friend of mine and I were talking about school. The friend has a student in middle school and apparently they are doing a team teaching environment. Teachers are grouped together and then students rotate as a small group between the teachers. It's also called a pod system. The idea is that it creates a school within a school environment so the school doesn't feel as huge to the students. There are three teams of teachers in this school.
Anyways, my friend tells me that her child has been placed in the "advanced" pod. She infers that the two other pods are "average" or perhaps one is "average" and one is for "behind" students.
I'm dubious about this claim. Can you really segregate kids in middle school based on academic ability? Even if you could, would an administration ever do this? It'd make a lot more sense to me to have a diverse classroom environment rather than trying to segregate everyone based on academic ability.
Tracking is less common than it was prior to the 90s but it is making a comeback. The reality is that for some subjects, like reading and math, it never went away.
And for those core subjects, I don't think there is anything wrong with tracking. Teachers can provide the most specific instruction when they can cater it to a group based on their more common abilities. Unfortunately, the reality is when you have a room of many different abilities, the top kids get bored/ignored, the lower skilled kids fall farther behind, and the teacher is forced to teach to the middle.
Can you really segregate kids in middle school based on academic ability? Even if you could, would an administration ever do this? It'd make a lot more sense to me to have a diverse classroom environment rather than trying to segregate everyone based on academic ability.
Students are routinely tracked based on academic ability even in elementary school.
In some instances, I have seen it subtly done for preschoolers as well.
When I was in middle school (during the late 80s), we had exactly the "pod" system you are referring to. We called them clusters, and within each cluster were five groups (A, B, C, D, E). The A group was comprised of the smart high achievers and the D and E groups were a lot of ESL kids and other students who were not on grade level. B and C groups seemed to be the average kids. I know this has fallen out of favor more recently. I don't teach in a public school (nor do I send my children to a public school), so I don't have a strong opinion on it, but my instinct tells me that tracking is good for the "A group" kids and not as good for the rest, particularly the kids who would be placed in the lowest sections. Mixing them all together is not as good for the higher-achieving kids. I don't know that there's a good answer, though I'd lean toward tracking them only because it's what's more familiar to me aind it seems that it would allow the teacher to be more efficient and effective.
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